1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the field of computer user interfaces, and more particularly to a method of displaying tab titles when there are too many tabs to be displayed in the area available for tabs.
2. Description of the Related Art
The tab metaphor provides a popular and powerful method of displaying information in computer system graphical user interfaces. Graphical tabs, analogous to file folder tabs, provide handles to information. A user accesses information by selecting the tab associated with the information.
The information associated with a tab is identified by a title displayed on the tab. In many instances, a title may be longer than the width of a tab. Currently, whenever the title is too long to fit in the tab, the system truncates the title. Since there is only a limited amount of screen or window real estate available to tabs, as more tabs are added to the display, the widths of the tabs must be reduced. As the width of a tab is reduced, more and more of the title must be truncated. The more a title is truncated, the less information it provides. With large numbers of tabs, their titles may be so severely truncated as to make the titles ineffective to distinguish one tab from another.